


Aftermath

by FuchsiaMae



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Ficlet Collection, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2019-08-02 02:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16296602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FuchsiaMae/pseuds/FuchsiaMae
Summary: Ficlets for Caroline after Cave Johnson's death.





	1. Sunlight

Light snuffed out.

He was her sun, the bright center of her world. She revolved around him. The light of her life, the joy, the hope to survive even when things looked bleakest, was him. All him. His strength and determination. His bright smile. 

And then he was gone.

What happens when you take away the sun?

She closes, like a flower in the dark. Protects herself. Builds up her walls. Her world is cold and merciless, and to survive she must be cold and merciless to match. 

(There used to be gardens in her heart, and windows to let in sunlight. There used to be wonder in her world. When did she get so old?)

And she is bitter. She worked so hard, for so long, and this is her reward. Pain. Loss. Death. She is so very bitter. And something in her says,  _fuck it_. 

She doesn’t have to pretend anymore. Doesn’t have to keep up appearances or paint on a smile. The one person she smiled for is dead, and she doesn’t owe a damn thing to anyone else. Let them hate her. Let them bitch and moan. The perfect assistant, the prim put-together woman they all knew, the sweet and smiling girl he fell in love with – that woman is gone. She died with her master, like a faithful pet. 

What she is now is what was left behind. Something lean and feral. Ugly and abandoned. Something that will scratch and claw and  _fight_ to survive at all costs. 

(This new creature scares herself sometimes.)

She will not be happy, but she will  _survive_ , goddammit, she will survive and she will keep this place alive because it’s all she has left now. It’s her home and her child and her deepest love and her last bit of him, it’s her everything, and she’ll see the whole world burn before she lets it come to harm. 

Take care of the facility. It’s her last remnant of purpose. Without that, she’d be adrift as well as alone. Nothing to live for. No reason at all. 

 _Take care of the facility_. He told her that. 

(Sometimes she feels so tired.)

She hasn’t been aboveground in years now. The place is self-sustaining. She doesn’t need the sunlight anyway.

She makes do, in her cavern in the dark. But his memory remains, warm and wistful, and the hollow of his absence is so, so cold. 


	2. Remains

The place seemed so empty now.

Its winding halls once thrummed with vitality, contagious life in every click and whirr of machinery, in a chorus of conversations as people went about their work, in the char-and-chemical smells of the air. Now it only felt tired. And within it, she only felt tired.

The building’s bleakness was echoed in her face, both worn down together by the same eroding years. She aged with it, and faded with it, as if it were an extension of her skin – or she of its crumbling walls. The lines around her mouth like cracks in plaster. The set of her jaw like weathered steel. The hollow darkness in her eyes like the mine’s forgotten caverns, sealed off long ago, too deep and secret for the light.

Once she’d been young and thriving, like the company itself. Those years seemed so far gone. Gone, with her smiles and the music of her laughter. Gone, with Aperture’s once-great success. Gone, with the man who brought them. Gone.

And the hard truth was that they wouldn’t be back. Trying to restore the facility was as foolish as trying to reclaim her own youth, and with cruel, cold certainty, she knew it. 

Still she spent sleepless nights poring over paperwork, but it was out of habit, not hope. Aperture would never thrive again. No amount of work would change that. She only kept on trying because work was all she had. 

Aperture Science’s heart was dead, and its body was dying. And when it finally breathed its last, she would too.

Something in her felt relieved.

Aperture swallowed her up in its cold emptiness, and she was so very tired. She would welcome a little rest.


	3. Sacrifice

She never thought science would scare her.

Well, she never thought science would approach her this way. All those years ago, when her so naive young self came to this place, she imagined a life of filing and dictation, perpetual office work with the real science just out of reach. 

How wrong she was. How wrong, how wrong. 

Now the young girl has steel-grey hair, and deep-etched laugh lines frame a mouth that no longer smiles. She looks up at the metal monster and feels her stomach knot around a lump of ice. It isn’t ready yet. But someday soon it will be.

He’d planned it for himself, and it was what he’d always wanted – immortality and omniscience within his own domain. Zeus in his Olympus. This was his dream. But this time “impossible” finally got the best of him, and now nothing seems worth dreaming anymore. 

But even without him, his facility’s still here. Aperture’s still here. And she’s still here. (The word “widow” tastes too bitter to speak, so she drops it in her cavernous heart and leaves it to freeze.) Left to fight the wolves and vultures away from his moldering legacy, left with a dead man’s dying dream. Expected to die for it herself.

She never thought science would scare her, but she never thought it would turn its merciless jaws her way. Science demands sacrifice. She’s always known that. Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, can’t make a discovery without losing test subjects along the way – and a few human lives is a paltry price to pay for innovation. She and Aperture have lived by that rule for forty years. But somehow she never imagined that one of those lives sacrificed would someday be her own. 

She’s truly surprised by the visceral fear. Somewhere beneath her intellect, pumping stress chemicals into her system until her whole body trembles, her primitive brain does not want this. 

The tests are in progress. The test subjects emerge gibbering and drooling or in body bags. Her chances for survival, at this moment, do not look good.

But this, she reminds herself for the trillionth time, is for Aperture. This is for science. (This is for the dead man cold in his cryo-crypt whose warm hand once touched hers.) Nothing else matters when there’s science to do.

She holds her head high. She gazes into the titan’s lifeless optic, and does not flinch.

Sometimes she’s almost eager for it. The smell of omnipotence tempts her power-starved appetite, and she salivates at the thought of revenge. These lab monkeys could use a lesson or two about what working at Aperture really means. She dreams of locking down the facility and hearing their screams, wresting control from them as they had wrested it from her, hearing the terror of retribution trembling in their voices as they beg the butt of their jokes and the object of their scorn to spare their wretched lives. One day, maybe, she’ll crush them all like rats in a trap. 

But the fleeting possibility of power is far less present than the bodies wheeled almost daily down to the morgue. Sometimes the smell of charred brain matter fills her with a more perverse kind of eagerness – an empty, falling feeling, like careening towards a pit of nothingness and not caring what lies at the bottom. Sometimes she thinks about eternity spent within these cold concrete walls, and it makes her sick. 

Sometimes she just wants to die. 


	4. 1992

She is sixty years old, and somehow everything is in the numbers.

She is sixty years old. She’s been at Aperture forty-one years — more than two-thirds of her life — and the last six years have been without him. She is sixty years old, and she can’t pretend to be young anymore. 

Time passes in stacks of paper piled up on her desk, all awash with numbers — the last month, the last year, the last five years, laid out with cruel precision, neatly documenting her company’s hopelessness. Impossible numbers. She has to balance them all.

Four AM her usual quitting time, though she doesn’t go home. Three more cups of coffee. An hour of fitful sleep, before other numbers wake her. 

Seventy million dollars in moon rocks. Nine months to live. Six months. Three. 

And now dozens of lawsuits, thousands of salaries to pay, hundreds of thousands of tests to manage, billions left in debt — and one woman left to manage them all. 

One woman holding up the world, and she is no Atlas. She is sixty years old, and tired. 

In explaining the GLaDOS project to her, a young technician had said that computers only really had two numbers. One and zero. On and off. Everything they built from there, all the complex software her facility now depended on, was made of ones and zeros.

How simple it sounded. 

No years, no ages, no four-letter words — like loss, or love, or pain. No sleepless hours, no crows’ feet to count. No etched dates on trophies or graves. Nothing but ones and zeros.

Sometimes, to clear her mind, she counts in binary as high as she can.


	5. Cut

Caroline cut her hair twice in her life.

Aging snuck up on her – a strand of grey here, a few lines there – but she’d never focused on her own health. Picking herself over in the mirror was more luxury than she could afford. Someone else needed her care more. 

Her boss was older, twelve years older, but it wasn’t until he started to show it that she realized what those twelve years meant. He hit sixty when she was forty-eight. His voice roughened. His posture sagged. He tired more quickly, exhausted by workdays he’d once have shrugged off as nothing – and his temper flared in frustration every time. He was growing old, and no one hated it more than he did. And that was before he got sick. 

Then it was pain meds, and coughing, and doctors, and tests. Aching muscles and shaking limbs. Hospital beds. After not very long, he needed a cane. He hated the cane. He refused to use the cane. Caroline supported him, often literally and always figuratively, every day spent at his side. 

With her attention elsewhere, she spent no time on her own looks. Until one day she glanced in the mirror and saw an old woman looking back. 

Stress had been wrinkling her face for years, but what really struck her was the grey brightly streaking her long dark hair. She thought about dyeing it – but dismissed the idea. Vanity took a backseat. At least until things were better. 

Things didn’t get better. He coughed blood, and trembled. Some days he couldn’t remember her name. Some days she could feel herself greying. 

When he died, she cut it off.

No more long dark hair – it was steel-grey now, bobbed below her ears in a cut that emphasized the harshness in her jaw. No more gentle caregiver, with her soft words and kind hands – she died with the man in the hospital bed. She couldn’t be tender-hearted now. She was a CEO, she was in desperate straits, and she was alone. A tender heart would break. 

Some say people cut their hair to mark a change in their lives, to leave behind their past and start afresh. That was the first time Caroline cut her hair. The second was not far off. Again, it was done to mark a major life change, a shedding of the past, a radical shift in her existence. And again it was done to mark a death – her own. 

It was a neurological procedure. They had to shave her head before they could begin.

First they cropped it close to her scalp. She held still and closed her eyes and tried not to hear the scissors. When that was done she peeked an eye open – and a mad-looking old lady peeked back from the mirror, newly cut hair like a badly-shorn doll’s, the floor around her littered with strands of silver. Then the technician turned the razor on. She watched that time. She watched as the rest of her hair fell away, and the old woman in the mirror was left bald as a strange, wrinkled egg.

Her gaze wandered over her own reflection as, behind her, another technician prepared the anesthetic. She tried to distract herself with this new appearance. She tried. But behind her reflection she glimpsed the gleaming instrument tray.

The razor, she knew, was nothing compared to the sound of that bone saw. 


End file.
